Microstructural abnormalities of substantia nigra in Parkinson's disease: A neuromelanin sensitive MRI atlas based study.

ABSTRACT: Microstructural changes associated with degeneration of dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) in Parkinson's disease (PD) have been studied using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). However, these studies show inconsistent results, mainly due to methodological variations in delineation of SNc. To mitigate this, our work aims to construct a probabilistic atlas of SNc based on a 3D Neuromelanin Sensitive MRI (NMS-MRI) sequence and demonstrate its applicability to investigate microstructural changes on a large dataset of PD. Using manual segmentation and deformable registration we created a novel SNc atlas in the MNI space using NMS-MRI sequences of 27 healthy controls (HC). We first quantitatively evaluated this atlas and then employed it to investigate the micro-struc

SUBMITTER: Safai A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7267920 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature